Saturday, April 6, 2013

Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin said he "personally agrees" with the idea of withdrawing all South Korean staff from the Kaesong Industrial Complex in North Korea.

Kim was responding to a plea from Saenuri Party lawmaker Han Ki-ho in a meeting of the National Assembly's Defense Committee on Thursday.

Han said, "We should recommend to President Park Geun-hye that South Korean workers in Kaesong should return home. If any North Korean provocation were followed by retaliation, they could be held hostage."

Kim said the Unification Ministry is in charge and has already decided its policy. "As a defense minister, I will focus on military assistance in times of crisis," he added.

“What Japan is doing is actually quite dangerous because they’re doing it after 25 years of just simply accumulating deficits and not getting the economy going,” said George Soros on CNBC.

“If what they’re doing gets something started, they may not be able to stop it. If the yen starts to fall, which it has done, and people in Japan realise that it’s liable to continue and want to put their money abroad, then the fall may become like an avalanche.”

Kyle Bass from Hayman Capital says "macro tourists" – like me, I suppose – have lost their heads over Japan. The experiment will end in tears and an explosion of debt.

"What they're trying to do is materially devalue the currency, in order to become slightly more trade competitive, while attempting to hold their rates marketplace flat.

Two more people have contracted bird flu in Shanghai, China's health ministry said on Saturday, as authorities closed live poultry markets and culled birds to combat a new virus strain that has killed six people.

State-run Xinhua news agency said authorities planned to slaughter birds at two live poultry markets in Shanghai and another in Hangzhou after new samples of the H7N9 virus were detected in birds at the three sites.

More than 20,000 birds have been culled at another Shanghai market where traces of the virus were found this week.

Italy's caretaker cabinet said on Saturday it would pay 40 billion euros ($52 billion) of the state's debts to private companies over the next 12 months, while vowing to stick within the European Union's deficit limit.

The government approved a decree intended to provide vital liquidity to cash-strapped firms and help tackle a deep recession in the euro zone's third-largest economy. But industry groups said it would still be difficult for businesses to claim their money despite the measures.

The massive backlog of bills owed by Italy's public administration has been a longstanding source of complaint by companies struggling to raise credit from banks facing increasingly tight credit conditions themselves.

Five Egyptians were killed and eight wounded in clashes between Christians and Muslims in a town near Cairo, security sources said on Saturday, in the latest sectarian violence in the most populous Arab state.

Christian-Muslim confrontations have increased in Muslim-majority Egypt since the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 gave freer rein to hardline Islamists repressed under his rule.

Four Christians and one Muslim were killed when members of both communities started shooting at each other in Khusus outside the Egyptian capital, the sources said.

WASHINGTON – As the North Korean government cautions staffers at British and other Western diplomatic missions that it can’t guarantee their safety after “April 10,” the North Korean General Staff is warning the United States again that it had “better ponder over the prevailing grave situation.”

The statement threatened to unleash “cutting-edge smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear strike means” against what the North Koreans believe are U.S. preparations to wage a nuclear war against them.

“The merciless operation of its revolutionary armed forces in this regard has been finally examined and ratified,” the General Staff statement said, indicating that in addition to the threat of a missile attack, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK, may deploy its million-man army.

Is the Obama administration’s military build up in the Pacific part of the president’s so-called pivot-toward-Asia strategy, a move that could demonstrate the biggest shift in world power since World War II?

Specifically, is Washington using the North Korean nuclear standoff as an excuse to shift massive military might to Asia just as China and other powers seek to create a new economic order that would rival the Western-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund?

It is difficult for most seasoned observers to explain why Obama is suddenly responding to North Korean aggression when the White House did little in 2008 when North Korea refused to allow United Nations inspectors into its nuclear plants.

A dinner of boiled vegetables and 3.3 square meters of floor space for sleeping, those are the harsh conditions awaiting laborers who undertake government-mandated decontamination work necessitated by the nuclear accident at Tokyo Electric’s Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima Prefecture. In some cases workers are basically laboring for free when taxpayer-funded danger pay is excluded from their pay packets.

General contractors at the top of the pay pyramid and farthest from the dangers of the worksite reap the greatest benefits. They are the ones who directly contract with the government to take on the decontamination work. Once contracted, these firms subcontract work out to other companies, who in turn do the same. Onsite workers are employed by companies that are three or four steps removed from the source of funds. After each firm has taken its cut, not much money is left for paying workers. In the chart below, the national government, which is the source of the funds, is highlighted in blue. It is followed by the general contractor, and then three subcontractors. Highlighted in orange at the bottom of the food chain are the workers taking all the health risks associated with the cleanup.

Sarah Groves (top picture), 24, was found dead inside the boathouse (bottom) this morning on the Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir. A Dutch man, who had also been apparently staying in the houseboat, was arrested 45 miles away. Police have said he was trying to flee from the area, carrying his passport.

Scientists in the Dutch city of Rotterdam know precisely what it takes for a bird flu to mutate into a potential human pandemic strain - because they've created just such mutant viruses in the laboratory.

So as they watch with some trepidation the emergence in China of a strain of bird flu previously unknown in humans, they also argue it vindicates their controversial decision to conduct these risky experiments despite fierce opposition.

Above all else, what the world needs to know about this new strain of H7N9 bird flu is how likely it is to be able to spread efficiently among human populations.

And according to Ab Osterhaus, a world leading flu researcher who is head of viroscience of the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, studies his team and another in the United States have been doing are the best way to find out.

"At the moment we don't know whether we should go for a full-blown alert or whether we can sit back and say this is just a minor thing," Osterhaus told Reuters in a telephone interview.

President Bashar al-Assad has warned that if rebel forces battling to overthrow him take power in Syria they could destabilize the Middle East for decades.

The Syrian leader, locked in a two-year conflict which he says has been fuelled by his regional foes, also criticized Turkey's "foolish and immature" leaders and Arab neighbors he said were arming and sheltering rebel fighters.

"If the unrest in Syria leads to the partitioning of the country, or if the terrorist forces take control ... the situation will inevitably spill over into neighboring countries and create a domino effect throughout the Middle East and beyond," he said in an interview with Turkish television.

Chinese officials have found traces of a new bird flu virus in more areas in Shanghai and in the nearby city of Hangzhou, news reports said on Saturday, as authorities slaughtered birds to stop the spread of the virus that has killed six people.

State-run Xinhua news agency said authorities planned to cull birds at two live poultry markets in Shanghai and another in Hangzhou after samples of the H7N9 virus were detected in birds at the three sites.

More than 20,000 birds have been culled at another Shanghai market where traces of the virus were found this week.

A suicide bomber killed 22 people and wounded 60 in a crowded election campaign tent in the Iraqi city of Baquba on Saturday, police and medics said.

A decade after the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq is still struggling with political instability and violence that in recent weeks has killed at least 10 candidates who had planned to run in forthcoming local elections.

The vote is due to be held across the country later in April, but has already been delayed in two Sunni Muslim-majority governorates due to security concerns.

Staff at embassies in North Korea appeared to be remaining in place on Saturday despite an appeal by authorities in Pyongyang for diplomats to consider leaving because of heightened tension after weeks of bellicose exchanges.

North Korean authorities told diplomatic missions they could not guarantee their safety from next Wednesday - after declaring that conflict was inevitable amid joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises due to last until the end of the month.

For decades, the regime has issued threats of turning South Korea into a "sea of fire" or used choice words such as "human scum" or "political idiot" when denouncing South Korean and U.S. leaders.

But even measured against such standards, North Korea's barrage over the past month, from threatening to launch an "all-out war" to "diversified precision nuclear strike" against Washington, "wipe out" a South Korean island, or hurling a sexist insult against Park Geun-hye, South Korea's first female elected leader, to, most recently, warning of an imminent "moment of explosion," is quite unusual.

And now, after saying that plans for merciless operation has been "finally examined and ratified," Pyongyang is hinting at another long-range missile launch.

What's going on?

First, we must assume the North Korean leadership is not crazy or suicidal in spite of bizarre things it says and does.

He was a clerk at a shoe company, though he hadn't worked for some time. She was a retired artisan. Together, they had no more than 500 euros a month, from her pension, to live off of.

On Friday, they were dead.

In Italy, a country in a deep economic malaise and political disarray, there's no shortage of people struggling nowadays. Even then, the suicides of Romeo Dionisi, 62, and Anna Maria Sopranzi, 68, struck a nerve -- triggering an outpouring of disbelief and sorrow not only in their seaside eastern Italian community, but around the nation.

The death toll in a building collapse in Thane, India, jumped to 72 Saturday. Among those who died when the illegal structure near Mumbai crumbled are 26 children, according to R.S. Rajesh, spokesman for India's disaster response agency.

The gruesome succession of recovered corpses was interrupted by two hopeful moments.

Florida deputies on the hunt for Joshua and Sharyn Hakken accused of kidnapping their two young sons now believe that the family may be on board a 25-foot 1972 Morgan sailboat, which the father recently bought. After ditching their GMC pickup truck in a parking garage in Madeira Beach near the marina, the Hakkens were seen sailing in their boat underneath the John's Pass Bridge towards the Gulf of Mexico.

A slideshow presentation shown to US Army Reserve recruits classifies Christians, including both evangelicals and Roman Catholics, as religious extremists, placing them in the same category as skinheads, the Ku Klux Klan, Hamas and Al Qaeda.

The presentation also warned that members of the military are prohibited from taking leadership roles in any organization the Pentagon considers 'extremist,' and from distributing the organization's literature, whether on or off a military installation.

The opening slide warns that 'the rise in hate crimes and extremism outside the military may be an indication of internal issues all [armed] services will have to face.'

A policeman has been killed and three civilians were injured after a bomb strapped to a donkey exploded at a police post in Afghanistan.

Local government spokesman Sarhadi Zwak says the animal blew up in front of the checkpoint in the Alingar district of Laghman province.

Mr Zwak said Taliban militants were responsible for the bomb, which was remotely detonated. Insurgents are finding new ways to thwart stepped up security measures in their bid to undermine confidence in the Afghan government.

Whitehall has admitted that waste from recycling bins is being shipped to countries including China, India and Indonesia, where much of it ends up in landfill. In papers published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, ministers concede that what happens to the 12 million tons of 'green' waste shipped abroad every year is largely beyond their control.

Clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian demonstrators injured 35 people on Friday, Palestinian sources said, as protests sparked by the death of a Palestinian in an Israeli jail went on for a fourth day.

Around 10 demonstrators suffered minor injuries when police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades to disperse a protest in the Issawiya neighbourhood of annexed Arab east Jerusalem, an AFP correspondent reported.

At least 60 people lost their lives on Friday in a road accident which occurred on Benin- Ore road located in southern Nigeria, according to rescue officials and officers of the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) .

A truck, luxury bus and fuel-laden tanker went aflame after a collision on the busy road, causing the multiple deaths, according to rescue officials.

One rescue official who declined to be mentioned said more than 60 people were burnt in the incident which also involved several vehicles on the road linking the two southern states of Edo and Ondo.

"The fire spread to a mechanic workshop in the area and more than eight more vehicles undergoing repairs were burnt," the source said.

Struggling families will lose thousands of pounds in the new financial year while Government tax reforms save 13,000 millionaires an average of £100,000, Labour claimed today.

Among a raft of changes coming into effect today are the largest rise in the personal allowance, which means that no one pays any tax until they earn more than £9,440, and a fall in the higher rate threshold to £41,450.

But a one earner family with children will be £4,000 worse off on average in the next 12 months under changes introduced since the Coalition took power, according to Opposition analysis of figures published by the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

Fisker Automotive, the struggling government-backed hybrid sports car maker, on Friday terminated most of its rank-and-file employees in what sources said was a last-ditch effort to conserve cash and stave off a potential bankruptcy filing.

Fisker, which raised $1.2 billion from investors and tapped nearly $200 million in government loans, has "at least" $30 million in cash on hand, according to a source familiar with the company's finances.

About 160 workers were fired at a Friday morning meeting at Fisker's Anaheim, California, headquarters